The Thinking Machine 105

In their series The Thinking Machine, critics Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin create a new video essay for Filmkrant every month.

Brian De Palma is a director who usually relies on variety and surprise in the way he shoots and edits scenes. In the build-up to the famous staircase shootout in The Untouchables (1987), however, he does something that is, for him, quite weird: he uses the same angle on Kevin Costner, in the act of looking around, over twenty times.

What’s going on? There’s a simple explanation for this, but also – if we take into account De Palma’s preview of this scene in the ultra-low-budget Greetings (1968) – a more complex set of insinuations.